A digital camera is a camera that produces digital images that can be stored in a computer, displayed on a screen and printed. Most cameras sold today are digital, and digital cameras are incorporated into many devices ranging from personal digital assistants (PDAs) and mobile phones (camera phones) to vehicles. Many digital cameras (sometimes referred to as video cameras) can also record moving videos with sound (audio). When built into smartphones, mobile phones, PDAs and laptop computers, digital cameras often store the images in a compressed format because of the relatively high bit rate and large file size of uncompressed video.
Digital and video cameras share an optical system, typically using a lens with a fixed or variable diaphragm to focus light onto an image pickup device. The diaphragm and shutter admit the correct amount of light to the imager, which produces an output that can be processed, stored and displayed. The processing typically includes the production of an RGB image from the digitized output of the imaging device (often a CCD sensor), adjustment for brightness, white balance, sharpness and contrast. Some digital cameras can also perform elementary image editing, such as cropping and stitching pictures.
Digital cameras coupled to powerful computers can allow for augmented reality (AR), which brings components of the digital world into a person's perceived real world. Augmented Reality (AR) is often used synonymously with Mixed Reality (MR) to mean a hybrid reality made by the merging of real and virtual worlds to produce new environments and visualizations where physical and digital objects co-exist and interact in real time.
With some AR systems, a head-mounted display, which tracks the movement of the head, is used to display the AR images. With the help of advanced AR technology (e.g. computer vision and object recognition) the information about the surrounding real world of the user becomes interactive and capable of digital manipulation. For example, information about the environment and its objects can be overlaid on a real world display.
In the context of smartphones, e.g. mobile phones operating on the iOS or Android operating systems, simple AR technology can be implemented using “apps,” which are typically downloaded application programs which manipulate the output of the built-in digital camera. For example, Pokémon Go is a location-base augmented reality game developed by Niantic, Inc. of San Francisco, Calif. for iOS and Android devices (e.g. smartphones and pads). However, due to the limited processing power and sensory inputs of a typical smartphone, the positioning and characteristics of virtual objects with respect to the real world imagery tends to be relatively crude.
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